I laughed when my brother said he wanted to become a nurse

Dear Delyara, When my younger brother was seventeen, he told me he wanted to become a nurse. I laughed. I said nursing was “a woman’s job” and told him he should aim higher. He became an electrician instead. He hated it. Years later, he admitted he had applied to nursing college secretly and withdrawn after our father and I mocked the idea. He died last month at forty-three from a sudden heart condition. At the funeral, one of his friends told me how brilliant he had been caring for his mother-in-law during cancer treatment. “He should have been a nurse,” she said. I had to leave the room. I know my brother made his own adult choices. I know one stupid comment at seventeen did not control twenty-six years. Still, I can hear my laughter. There are regrets about things we did. This is different. I regret helping make one possible version of my brother feel ridiculous before he had the confidence to become it. I keep imagining him in scrubs, tired after a shift, complaining about patients, maybe happier. Grief has invented an entire career for the man I helped talk out of trying.